IF is hard work

On Feb 1, 9:13 am, Gary Leighton <leightong... DeleteThis @hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> It's not so much the puzzles and problems that I find hard work,
> although they can be. The main thing I find hard work is the mapping,
> and remembering where objetcts or puzzles or creatures are. I really
> don't want to be taking notes or pencil drawing maps.
>
> Gary

I haven't tried it but IFMapper supposedly will map as you play:

http://ifmapper.rubyforge.org/start.html#Features%20of%20IFMapper

I think there are other programs out there for z-code games but I
can't remember one off the top of my head.

I agree that IF is kind of hard compared to games in other genres,
some of which are being made so that the UI is as intuitive as
possible (i.e. flOw, many FPSes). I'm not sure if you can say the same
for any IF games -- I don't know how intuitive you could make an IF,
to be honest.
 >> Stay informed about: IF is hard work 

In article
<0a2f3914-8bee-4be6-8cb1-db2fe16d83f0.RemoveThis@e25g2000prg.googlegroups.com>,
Gary Leighton <leightongary.RemoveThis@hotmail.com> wrote:

> On the whole I find that playing IF is hard work. Do you?
>
> I generally find modern video games much easier to play than IF. This
> maybe because I've spent many many years developing video game skills.
> Also, I tend to stick to genres that I'm good at like FPS or RTS.
>
> Anyway, I'm wondering if I've missed something obvious. Are there any
> tricks that make IF easier to play? Do you have a good utility that
> helps you (i.e. a mapping tool). Do you have a particular strategy?
> What is your strategy for saving games? Do you use undo? Do you use
> transcripts? Is there a 'god' mode that I've never heard of
>
> It's not so much the puzzles and problems that I find hard work,
> although they can be. The main thing I find hard work is the mapping,
> and remembering where objetcts or puzzles or creatures are. I really
> don't want to be taking notes or pencil drawing maps.
>
> Gary


I thought you were going to say that "creating IF" is hard work, and I
was going to agree. Playing is child's play by comparison. The thing
that bothers me about most IF games is that either they're not games (a
lot of so-called "good IF" falls into that category), or they're so
difficult that you basically need to read minds to play the thing. Of
course I favor very games bursting with description that let you explore
a lot. I hate being locked into a small set of rooms where all you can
do is guess until you figure out the cryptic answer. That stuff is for
the birds, or at least someone other than me.

-- Poster
www.intaligo.com Building, INFORM, Seasons (8000 lines and counting)
 >> Stay informed about: IF is hard work 

Gary Leighton wrote:
> On the whole I find that playing IF is hard work. Do you?

Yes, I see your point. The level of moment-to-moment gratification is
rather higher in other pastimes than in IF. It has long seemed to me
that a real weakness of IF as a medium is that one of the author's main
purposes is to block, thwart, and frustrate his or her audience. That
strikes me as not an extremely useful approach to crafting entertainment.

In practice, it requires of the author a delicate balance between
introducing difficulties and rewarding the player's persistence in
solving them. When you get a locked door to open, the author should
ideally reward you with a rich new environment to explore, not just a
dim and empty room. The latter would be rude.

> Anyway, I'm wondering if I've missed something obvious. Are there any
> tricks that make IF easier to play?

A lot of people type 'take all' on entering each room, just to see
what's available. That has always struck me as undercutting the realism
of the medium: We don't normally pick up everything portable on entering
a room! But it can be a useful technique. (TADS 3 provides a Hidden
class in part, I'm sure, to prevent this technique from producing
reliable results.)

> Do you have a good utility that
> helps you (i.e. a mapping tool). Do you have a particular strategy?
> What is your strategy for saving games? Do you use undo? Do you use
> transcripts? Is there a 'god' mode that I've never heard of

There are some useful debugging commands, and I'm sure a few authors
have considered releasing games with the debugging commands left in, but
I don't know that anyone has ever done it. In any case, using debugging
commands (such as purloin for picking up distant objects and gonear for
hopping around to distant locations) can introduce pseudo-bugs that
wouldn't exist otherwise.

> It's not so much the puzzles and problems that I find hard work,
> although they can be. The main thing I find hard work is the mapping,
> and remembering where objetcts or puzzles or creatures are. I really
> don't want to be taking notes or pencil drawing maps.

Pencil and paper may be close to inevitable. If you're handy with a
graphics program, I suppose you could produce a map as you go along.
That might be easier than pencil and paper, because you could move the
rooms around rather than erasing and redrawing.

A few games (including my own recent effort, Lydia's Heart) come bundled
with PDF maps. But even if you have such a map, you may want to print it
out and scribble the locations of important objects. I felt it would be
making the game too easy to include the objects and NPCs on the map. In
fact, there are a couple of puzzles that would be spoiled by a perfect
map, so the map contains a couple of errors of omission....

--JA
 >> Stay informed about: IF is hard work 

On Feb 1, 8:07 pm, George Oliver <georgeolive... RemoveThis @gmail.com> wrote:
> I haven't tried it but IFMapper supposedly will map as you play:
>
> http://ifmapper.rubyforge.org/start.html#Features%20of%20IFMapper

IFMapper is pretty cool. I don't always find it easier than pencil-and-
paper mapping, but it delivers everything I'd hope to find in an IF
mapping utility, and it's free.

Greg
 >> Stay informed about: IF is hard work 

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 >> Stay informed about: IF is hard work 

Gary Leighton <leightongary.TakeThisOut@hotmail.com> wrote:
> Anyway, I'm wondering if I've missed something obvious. Are there any
> tricks that make IF easier to play? Do you have a good utility that
> helps you (i.e. a mapping tool). Do you have a particular strategy?
> What is your strategy for saving games? Do you use undo? Do you use
> transcripts? Is there a 'god' mode that I've never heard of

Good questions. A few things that have helped me are:

* Take all - As another poster pointed out, this shows you ALL the items
in the room, and lets you pick up the ones that are portable.
Indispensable, even if we all feel a little guilty using it.
* Verbose - Turns on verbose mode, which shows you full descriptions of
every room, including ones you've visited before. Good for noticing
clues you may have missed the first time through.
* Exits - Shows you all the exits from a room, at least the ones that
aren't hidden.
* X <door, wall, ceiling, etc> - May give you clues to a hidden exit,
though it's annoying if you get that canned "north wall? south wall?"
answer.
* Exit - Sometimes a good shortcut to get out of a small room or
vehicle, without having to remember where the door is.

> It's not so much the puzzles and problems that I find hard work,
> although they can be. The main thing I find hard work is the mapping,
> and remembering where objetcts or puzzles or creatures are. I really
> don't want to be taking notes or pencil drawing maps.

I like GUEmap http://www.cjmweb.net/GUEmap/ The author recently updated
it, too. At another poster's suggestion I took a look at IFMapper but
saw you have to install Ruby (the scripting language and something
called FXRuby) to run it.

Maureen
 >> Stay informed about: IF is hard work 

On Feb 1, 12:13 pm, Gary Leighton <leightong... DeleteThis @hotmail.com> wrote:
> On the whole I find that playing IF is hard work. Do you?
>
> I generally find modern video games much easier to play than IF. This
> maybe because I've spent many many years developing video game skills.
> Also, I tend to stick to genres that I'm good at like FPS or RTS.
>
> Anyway, I'm wondering if I've missed something obvious. Are there any
> tricks that make IF easier to play? Do you have a good utility that
> helps you (i.e. a mapping tool). Do you have a particular strategy?
> What is your strategy for saving games? Do you use undo? Do you use
> transcripts? Is there a 'god' mode that I've never heard of
>
> It's not so much the puzzles and problems that I find hard work,
> although they can be. The main thing I find hard work is the mapping,
> and remembering where objetcts or puzzles or creatures are. I really
> don't want to be taking notes or pencil drawing maps.
>
> Gary

I think mapping is easier now than it once was. Modern authors are
less likely to include "twisty little passages" which require the
player to return in a different direction than they arrived.
Carefully written room descriptions (again, the author's
responsibility) can also help ease the pain of learning the locations
of things. Find an author you like, and check to see if they've
written anything else.

In response to the "difficulty" of IF versus FPS or other graphic
games, I think you're comparing apples to corndogs. Both can be fun.
But a written work (whether book, or IF) can be potentially more
evocative because the reader takes a more active role inserting their
own imagination into the story. That's what I like about the medium.

Dave
 >> Stay informed about: IF is hard work 

Sqwertz wrote:
> On Fri, 1 Feb 2008 13:10:56 -0800 (PST), Sami wrote:
>
>> What I find most annoying about IF is my own fault - my typing skills
>> are non-existent, so I'm always getting parser-doesn't-understand
>> messages for my typos.
>
> In the Infocom games, only the first 6 letters of a verb/object
> were significant.

Or nine, depending on Z-machine level.

--
John W. Kennedy
Read the remains of Shakespeare's lost play, now annotated!
http://pws.prserv.net/jwkennedy/Double%20Falshood/index.html
 >> Stay informed about: IF is hard work 

"Maureen Mason" <maureencmason RemoveThis @gmail.com> wrote in message
news:MPG.220f75eac734422a9896a5@news.newsguy.com...
>
> * X <door, wall, ceiling, etc> - May give you clues to a hidden exit,
> though it's annoying if you get that canned "north wall? south wall?"
> answer.

By this, did you mean the situation where you type "x wall" and get the
question "Which do you mean, the north wall, the south wall, the east wall
or the west wall?"

What would be the best response for a game to give in that situation? Should
"x wall" and "x walls" give you a single description like "the walls are
covered in cobwebs", or describe each wall in turn -- "The north wall has a
mural ..." -- or something else?

David Fisher
 >> Stay informed about: IF is hard work 

David Fisher <davidfisher DeleteThis @australiaonline.net.au> wrote:
> "Maureen Mason" <maureencmason DeleteThis @gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > * X <door, wall, ceiling, etc> - May give you clues to a hidden exit,
> > though it's annoying if you get that canned "north wall? south wall?"
> > answer.
>
> By this, did you mean the situation where you type "x wall" and get the
> question "Which do you mean, the north wall, the south wall, the east wall
> or the west wall?"
>
> What would be the best response for a game to give in that situation? Should
> "x wall" and "x walls" give you a single description like "the walls are
> covered in cobwebs", or describe each wall in turn -- "The north wall has a
> mural ..." -- or something else?

My recollection of playing IF as a newbie is that I was misled by the
"which wall?" response. My reaction was to assume "Aha! I bet there's
something important on one of those walls!" and I'd methodically examine
each one. It was annoying to realize it was just a default response,
and that all that typing was pointless.

Yes, unless it's a one-room game or the player's in an extremely
detailed room where each wall is important, I'd prefer a single
description -- something closer to what you get when you type "x floor"
or "x ceiling" -- so people don't get hung up on checking every wall
when it doesn't matter. If a game were to treat "x wall" like "x
walls" or "search walls", then you'd get back only what you needed to
know, e.g., "you see nothing special about the walls", or "you examine
the walls carefully but don't find any tell-tale cracks" or "low on the
south wall you notice a small opening half hidden by vines".

Thanks for asking
Maureen
 >> Stay informed about: IF is hard work 

On Feb 3, 6:56 am, Maureen Mason <maureencma... RemoveThis @gmail.com> wrote:
> Gary Leighton <leightong... RemoveThis @hotmail.com> wrote:
> > Anyway, I'm wondering if I've missed something obvious. Are there any
> > tricks that make IF easier to play? Do you have a good utility that
> > helps you (i.e. a mapping tool). Do you have a particular strategy?
> > What is your strategy for saving games? Do you use undo? Do you use
> > transcripts? Is there a 'god' mode that I've never heard of
>
> Good questions.  A few things that have helped me are:
no colon!

> * Take all - As another poster pointed out, this shows you ALL the items
> in the room, and lets you pick up the ones that are portable.  
> Indispensable, even if we all feel a little guilty using it.

/x all/ or /search all/ rocks if the game lets you. If there's no
searching at all, then /l in/, /l under/, /l behind/ are usually
clueful.
 >> Stay informed about: IF is hard work